John threw himself away from the attic door as the others stared in horror at the dark space above them.
"See?" Natasha said. "I didn't do that either."
"This might be worse than I thought," Ray said. "It could be a demon instead of a ghost. The ghost could have been simply its protector, its shield."
"Talking about it is getting us nowhere," Red growled. She charged up the ladder into the attic as the cackling laughter changed once more to the odd, metallic clanging noise.
"We can't let her do this alone!" John said and went up the ladder after her.
The others followed to find Red and John standing together, casting light into the far corner of the attic.
A pile of musty boxes stood there, a dilapidated tower of moldy cardboard and discarded Sunday morning papers. The whole attic had an old, wet smell, and Natasha could even pick out the tangy, soggy scent of mothballs.
Then the sound occurred again, through the pile of boxes. From where they stood, the sounds were even more prominent, though she could tell that the boxes themselves hindered the noise considerably. They were sounds like she had never heard before, a mixture of laughing, metallic beating, gears, and wheels churning. The whole ensemble would grind to a halt, pause for a few minutes, then start up again, with renewed vigor and vim, then taper into deathly silence.
Ray was the first to have courage to speak. "Um, do we want to check that out?"
A tickle of doubt ran up Natasha's spine. This had not been part of the plan that she had devised with Sandy. "I—I don't know. John?"
They all looked at their leader. In the faint glow of the flashlight, Natasha could see him grind his teeth, work the fake cigarette back and forth between the corners of his mouth. What harm would it do to check, she wondered. It could do all kinds of harm, and she knew that John was twice bitten, three times shy. But he had returned to Grantville to hear her out, to give her the opportunity to conduct a mission that they all could enjoy and could tell their grandchildren about.
"I'll check," John said. "You all back me up."
He grabbed the flashlight and Ray's cross tool. He inched closer to the boxes, pointing both objects forward as if they would shield him from danger.
The maniacal cackle and metal banging sounded again. John paused, and Red slammed into his back. "Careful," he hissed. "Walk on my left."
Red did so, and Natasha and Ray stood to his right. Natasha reached down as if to pet Fox's head. Damn! Left him in the basement. And of course, she had no weapon, nothing to protect her from whatever it was making those ghastly sounds beneath the pile of boxes. But she screwed her courage to the sticking point, as Shakespeare might have said, and moved forward with the rest, inching closer and closer to their doom.
John handed Ray the flashlight. He reached out his free hand and grabbed a warped box top. "Ready?" He asked.
Everyone nodded and braced themselves.
He pulled and the tower of cardboard toppled, and out of it, rolled the cackling head of a demon baby….
. . . We had found what we had come here for, what the ghost had been protecting. It was the demon baby that had terrorized Eckerlin's dreams; the very same one that had terrorized Grantville's children for years. It rolled out of its plague-ridden bassinet and lunged at John's legs, snapping with razor-sharp teeth and bloody gums. Its eyes glowed ruby red. Its maniacal laugh was the very same that I had heard in my own dreams, and I was not sure that we could do anything to stop it.
John kicked at it, struck it with his iron club, strong, powerful strikes against the demon's head and shoulders. It shrugged off the strikes as if they were nothing. It seemed to feed on the pain. John screamed as the beast's newborn teeth cut through his pant leg and found flesh. "Get it off me," he demanded. "Rid the world of this abomination!"
And we tried. Red grabbed it and threw it across the room. It struck the wall of the attic with a meaty thunk! It slid down the wall with a bloody streak, rolled free, and came at us once again.
I waited until it launched itself through the air at my face. I lashed out, much like the ghost had done at the stairs, and caught it with my Bible, hitting it square in the face. Teeth, spit and gore blew from its twisted mouth. Red kicked it hard in the stomach, and for the first time, it seemed truly hurt.
And now Ray, he who had been spent in defeating the ghost, came forward, and with fear and exhaustion tugging at his senses, raised his iron-toed boot and drove it into the face of the demon child, again and again and again . . .
Natasha couldn't stop laughing.
"What's so funny?" Ray asked, his boot over the smashed remains of yellow terrycloth, white cotton stuffing, and tiny broken cymbals.
"That's not a baby's head," she said. "That's a Jolly Chimp."
Red stepped up to view the damage. "What the hell is a Jolly Chimp?"
"It's an up-time toy," Natasha said, picking up the damaged monkey. "It's a little chimpanzee that you wind up, and it makes little chirping sounds and bangs its cymbals. Though, it looks like this one runs on batteries. See." She opened up the flap on the back, revealing the battery casing. "Looks like it's got a lot of corrosion. Probably been sitting in the box for years, forgotten. Sandy's toy, probably, when he was a kid. Batteries were wearing down and misfiring. I had a Halloween toy of a cauldron of singing frogs do that once. Me and my mom and dad would be sitting in the living room, and suddenly the frogs would start singing for no reason. Gave me the creeps."
"It could have been anything, though," Red said. "A rat, a raccoon, a rabid cat. Anything."
"Red's right," John said, kneeling down to look at the broken Jolly Chimp. "You did your duty, friend. And we thank you."
Natasha stopped laughing, though she kept on smiling. The scary ghost had been Sandy's idea, and although it was nothing more than a couple of stuffed pillow cases and a sheet hanging from a wire, it had been triggered successfully. The Jolly Chimp had been a surprise, and although it had been as harmless as the fake ghost, it had given her heart a jolt. And wasn't that what good monster hunting was all about?
"So is the mission over?" Ray asked.
John nodded. "Yep, and I'd say, a most successful mission indeed. Let's get out of here before we're discovered."
"What do we do with this?" Natasha asked, holding up the smashed Jolly Chimp.
"We should bring it along," John said. "If we leave it behind like that, they'll know someone was here, and we don't want to get your friend into trouble. Maybe we can fix it, and if not, put it in the clubhouse as a reminder of a job well done."
Natasha nodded, stood, and tucked the Jolly Chimp under her jacket.
They left the Eckerlin house through the basement door, relocking it behind them as they went. Natasha was happy, but more importantly, John was happy. There was a renewed spring in his step, a swagger in the way his coat shifted from side to side as they sneaked through backyards and out into the main road that led towards Natasha's house. John was happy, Red was happy, Ray was happy. Even Fox trotted along with renewed purpose.
The Monster Society had had a great adventure indeed….
And so it was that the Ghost of Eckerlin Hall and the Demon Baby of Grantville were defeated. And very few will ever know the truth of it, know that it was neither the work of godly men, nor the stalwart entitlements of kings or queens that brought those evils to heel. Few will ever know the truth that it was the bravery of a few simple folk with the unqualified dedication to rid the world of its monsters. The Gesellschaft der Ungethüme had done its duty once again in a quiet dark corner of the world, and only you, dear reader, know the truth of it.
****
Les Futuriens, Parts I and II
By Virginia DeMarce
Part I
November-December, 1636
Besançon
". . . so since he also holds the rank of prince étranger because of his descent from the ruling house of Brittany before it was incorporated into the territories of the French crown, Papa is not
only entitled to be formally addressed as ‘Your Highness' rather than ‘Your Grace' . . ."
Carey Calagna winced, forcing herself not to give a frazzled pull at her straight brown Dutch boy bob. She and Kamala Dunn cut one another's hair these days, and the kids' hair too, with a little home barber kit that she wouldn't sell for a fortune. Well, maybe, if they didn't get electricity in Besançon in the next few years, and she was faced with paying college tuition, she would sell the clippers out of it for a fortune…though the kit as a whole in its original box would be worth much more to a collector than an individual piece and maybe she could wear a braid . . .
". . . although the up-timers in general do not appear to have learned this, but he also has the right to wear a hat in the presence of the king at receptions for newly-appointed ambassadors from other countries. Thus he is of precisely equal rank to General Turenne, who is a cadet of the house of La Tour d'Auverne—his brother is still the independent ruler of Sedan, although not for long, if the king has his way—and Papa also has a hereditary claim to Bouillon in the Spanish Netherlands." Marguerite ended her lengthy disquisition on the finer points of court protocol as they applied to the ducs de Rohan in a rush of words.
Bernhard, born a duke of Saxe-Weimar and now by conquest and self-aggrandizement the Grand Duke of the County of Burgundy, had hired Carey to explain to his bureaucrats how up-time government worked. She wasn't entirely sure that the grand duke understood precisely where her unfinished college major in business administration and prior employment as Grantville's probate court clerk after the Ring of Fire had placed her in the overall hierarchy of "up-time experts." However, she had been what he could get and he paid well, not to mention that after the conviction of her ex-husband, Norman Bell, for fraud and embezzlement, she had decided their four kids would be a lot better off not growing up in Grantville.
So she and Kamala Dunn, whose kids had been taking a lot of flack at school because of what their father Johnny Horton had done at Suhl, had resumed their maiden names, packed up, and moved to Burgundy. Kamala had been more successful with her medical and public health duties than Carey with her instructional ones. Only a few of the grand duke's staff had either the time or inclination to listen to her. Only a couple of them had both, considering that she had arrived in 1635, and the Lorraine political crisis and threatened plague epidemic hit almost right away, while now, over a year later, they were spending a lot of time thinking about the developing chaos in France.
She had not expected to learn as much as she taught, if not more than she taught. Or, since she had vaguely expected that she would learn a lot of new stuff, she hadn't expected it to include a practical survival guide for the courtiers who surrounded the kings of France. Nor, when the duc de Rohan's marriageable daughter made it out of France and out of the grasp of the new King Gaston's matrimonial machinations, had she expected to be transferred to the status of combination English and up-time government tutor and senior chaperone for said daughter. But Rohan, in exile from France for several years for leading yet one more Huguenot rebellion, was now one of the grand duke's senior administrative deputies, so Bernhard had handed her over.
At the recommendation of Gerry Stone, that little red-haired mischief-maker! It was supposed to be temporary, until the duke's sister arrived to serve as the female head of his no-longer-bachelor household.
She'd been 32 when the Ring of Fire hit. Add another five and a half years—she hadn't expected to learn the new stuff from a girl who could easily have been her daughter, if she'd started popping out kids as soon as she graduated from high school. As it was, Dominique was only five or so years younger than the perpetually chatting Marguerite, duchesse de Rohan. Dominique was now a lady-in-waiting for said duchesse, along with Kamala's daughter Shae Horton. That was supposed to be temporary, also, until Marguerite's aunt could sift through the competing claims and desires of various prominent Huguenot families while trying to eliminate candidates who might be planted as agents for the benefits of their families—or, to be more honest, those who would be more so than usual, since all ladies-in-waiting were essentially agents put in place to further the interests of their families. In another illustration of the proverb that things are lonely at the top, the preferences of the lady upon whom they would be waiting rarely had anything to do with who was chosen.
When Carey resurfaced from her internal monologue, Marguerite might have finished with court protocol, but she was still talking, having moved on to the ever-fascinating (at least to a lot of people, both up-time and down-time, but not to Carey) discipline of genealogy. "Our senior line of Rohan descends from René I de Rohan who died in 1552 and held the titles of vicomte de Rohan, prince de Léon, comte de Porhoët, seigneur de Beauvoir and de La Garnache. In his day the feudal holdings in Brittany had not yet been sold off—even Papa was born at Blain…."
The chatter continued non-stop until Marguerite yawned. "I have to go to bed. Ever since M. von Bismarck startled Papa by proposing to him that I should become Rohan for myself, the very idea frightens him so much that now he expects that I will come to him for two hours every morning, right after he rises and before breakfast, to receive lessons on being Rohan. Since Papa rises three hours before dawn, I suppose I can only be grateful that there is hardly any social life in Besançon."
****
Grand Duke Bernhard's decision to live in the Hôtel de Champagney in the Battant Quarter, on the right bank of the Doubs River, outside Besançon proper but still inside the city walls, had been taken mostly on practical military grounds. If he wanted to be near his soldiers, then it was either the Quartier Battant or the Citadelle, the second of which he regarded as highly impractical. The Bonvalot family had not been thrilled, even though they had received a fair price for their house—nearly new, after all, built only 70 or so years earlier!
It also meant, though, that Rohan's former quarters had been a little cramped for his suddenly-increased household, given that they consisted, at the time Marguerite arrived, of two rooms in the former Hôtel Jouffroy, which over time had become the Inn of the Green Lion, one of which had provided sleeping quarters for him and his secretary and the other of which had been a parlor, library, office, and general all-purpose room. Unsurprisingly, he ate out. He had been fond of his view, though, which included the old Roman bridge across the river that gave access to the city proper.
Two rooms would not do when he had a daughter in residence, for a daughter involved a chaperone, a couple of ladies-in-waiting, a couple of maids at a minimum, a kitchen, a cook . . . His mind had boggled, so he had called in a real estate agent, and they were now occupying half of the Hôtel de Buyer in the main part of the town, at an utterly exorbitant rent. But it was, at least, a modern house, built during the previous century in the Italian style, far less drafty than the older medieval ones. Moreover, he had a private study to which he could retreat when the level of female chatter became unendurable. He had left his secretary in his old rooms in the Green Lion and used those as his office. Early morning walks were beneficial to an aging man's health, after all, and he found the thought that the up-time encyclopedias said that he would be dead in two more years rather discouraging, even if Bernhard did keep repeating that he had, after all, been killed in a battle that there would be no need to fight in this version of God's creation.
Security, he thought. The followers of Ducos would not, perhaps, be indifferent to the chance to attack him, and by extension attack him through his household members. He added six footmen to the household staff, two to be on duty at all times. As he was not required to make an elegant appearance for court society, he did not hire matched sets of well-built young men, but rather unmatched sets of recently retired non-coms from Bernhard's army. What they lacked in elegance, they would probably compensate for in vigilance.
Marguerite's arrival had not been the only cause for the restructuring of his household, though. "I," he had announced one day at dinner, "have decided to write a treatise on up-time
assumptions and attitudes." In the comparative peace of his new study/library, he had been thinking about this for several weeks. Being far too busy a man to go visit Grantville and study his subjects in situ, he had asked the grand duke for some of the up-timers already in Besançon to supplement his reading. Using Marguerite's arrival as a rationale, the grand duke had generously complied by transferring those he had determined were, for his purposes, least useful—namely Madame Calagna and a couple of female children—keeping the specialists in medicine and the mechanical arts for himself.
From Rohan's perspective, those least useful to the grand duke turned out to be the most useful to him. As Marguerite had explained to Carey, by appointing up-timers who were, if not Calvinist, at least not Catholic (like the down-time dressmaker, Susanna Allegretti, who had come out of France with her) to his daughter's household, the duke could, for the time being, manage to not offend all the families of French Huguenot nobility who thought that such appointments should go to their wives and daughters equally, but none of them particularly, and thus not exacerbate rivalries among his potential supporters should something happen.
Something, Carey suspected, was the revocation of the ducal exile. She personally thought, just based on reading the newspapers, that something might happen when hell froze over, but so far no one had asked her opinion on that matter.
It didn't hurt, of course, that the up-timers now resident in the ducal household could help elucidate the deeper meaning contained in the collected works of Dr. Seuss.
The two Dr. Seuss books requested by Gerry Stone for Marguerite had arrived the previous month. She read them, with assistance from Shae and Dominique, with mild interest; her father read them with much deeper interest. Since Ruvigny and Bismarck were back on active military duty for Grand Duke Bernhard, they wrote hasty thank-you notes to Gerry saying that they'd be sure to take a look at Yertle the Turtle when and if they got back to headquarters and had time. In the meantime, Yertle, which had arrived in the same package as the other two, reposed in the study of Henri duc de Rohan, who read it with utter concentration and the utmost fascination.
Grantville Gazette, Volume 65 Page 11